


Resignation

by LittleSweetCheeks



Series: Gershwin [8]
Category: Madam Secretary
Genre: F/M, relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:01:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26588542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleSweetCheeks/pseuds/LittleSweetCheeks
Summary: She intends to only ask for some time off. She never intends for it to go like this.
Relationships: Blake Moran/Nadine Tolliver
Series: Gershwin [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1898866
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	Resignation

**Author's Note:**

> .... well, it was bound to happen eventually.

It doesn’t even dawn on her what she’s done until she’s done it.

The time after their vacation is punctuated by what feels like progressively more horrid days at work and incrementally fewer evenings together in discovery and even those, they are often too wrung out from the days to even dream of enjoying one another. They do talk about it, about how things have changed, and they make plans they know they may not be able to keep.

They are together casually more often, though, and it’s very domestic. Blake hates cooking, but he’s a bit obsessive about cleaning and Nadine decides that her apartment has never looked better than under his care. They decide whose place they will go to based on how each day goes; she has more space and a superior kitchen, but he has a piano and is closer to Foggy Bottom. Half their wardrobes now inhabit the other’s closet.

It’s why it all takes her by surprise when it’s she who upends everything entirely by accident and she knows she’s going to hurt him in the small pause between when realization settles in her mind and when she takes her next breath.

Putting everyone, including him, on furlough was the final straw in a battle that’d become much to vicious for her tastes. When she looks down the list and realizes their family will be reduced to she and Jay assisting Elizabeth on their own, she can’t fathom how anything will get done. How she will come home to him each night and not talk about her day that she didn’t share with him.

She intends to only ask Elizabeth for the rest of her vacation time so she can catch her breath, a breath she hadn’t even realized she needed until the cruise. She’s tired. Tired of hatred, tired of paddling up stream, tired of the senseless violence. Tired of knowing it will never end. She tells Elizabeth about Roman and tries hard not to compare he and Blake as she’s excited over the prospect of a grandchild she never expected to have and when Elizabeth hears her resignation in what she didn’t say, she’s both relieved and shattered at once. She’s ready to retire, but she’s not ready to lose what she has with Blake.

“He’ll be okay.” Elizabeth whispers as they hug, seeming to understand what the apprehension is about. “I’ll name him my interim Chief of Staff so he will stay busy with work.”

“Okay.”

Nadine then finds herself standing behind her boss one last time as she listens to the speech Matt wrote to the staff. She wills tears to stay away, knows they’ll come soon when the news is shared. Elizabeth doesn’t waste time and as everyone disperses, Nadine hears her sending the others to her office to wait. They’ll be sharing this together now instead of her getting to sneak out quietly.

They seem to think Blake was looped in early and chide him a bit for not warning them, but she can see the absolute devastation in his eyes as Matt and Daisy and then Jay file out behind the Secretary, leaving them alone in Elizabeth’s office.

“You’re retiring.” Those two words break her heart. “A-and moving?”

“Roman suggested I move. I’m not sure if I will.” She shrugs a bit. “When I came to talk to Elizabeth, I didn’t expect to resign I- I came in to take time off. But this job has become-”

“I know.” He moves to sit on the sofa. “And I get it. And I don’t want you to suffer and recently this job has caused you a lot of suffering.”

“And it gave me you. And just because I’m not here doesn’t mean we’re over.”

“Roman will need your help getting settled in California, they’ll have the baby and their baby should have as much of you as they can get. They deserve to grow up knowing what an amazing woman you are. Don’t deny your family the opportunity to learn that about you.”

“Blake-”

He doesn’t move for several minutes before finally standing again and crossing to hold her close. “I will treasure for the rest of my life what we had. I don’t regret a moment of it except maybe that it couldn’t have lasted longer.” He lifts her chin so he can look in her eyes. “I knew this would never be forever, but my feelings for you will be.” She’s already speechless when he leans down and kisses her soundly and she feels it in her bones, it’s a goodbye. After this it will be different as they sort out and exchange their things and move on with their lives. Somehow, it’s both the clean break they seem to need and the heartbreak she never wanted all at once.

When Elizabeth finds her an hour later, she’s the one sitting alone on the sofa, tears dripping down her cheeks. She’s no longer her boss when she joins her and pulls her into a hug and lets her cry. When Nadine’s worn herself out, she sits up and apologizes, but Elizabeth seems to understand as always. “You’ll both find a way through this.”

“I know.” But it doesn’t make it not hurt. “You’ll keep an eye on him?”

Elizabeth’s smile is soft. “Of course. And you’ll stay in touch?”

“Of course.”

=MS=

Moving belongings ends up somehow harder and easier at once. Blake’s so busy now being Interim Chief as well as doing his best to still be the best assistant and care for his boss that it’s easy for her to collect her things from his place undisturbed, leaving his neatly in a box by the sofa before slipping her key back under the door. It’s done then. Over. Tomorrow there won’t be his Wicked mug to fill with coffee or his shirt to steal to lounge around the house in. She’ll only need to cook one egg at breakfast, if she cooks at all. She might walk to the bistro, but then she’ll be walking alone, his arm won’t be around her as he leans into her, whispering in her ear and making her laugh.

Sitting on her couch alone, she wonders when she’ll laugh again. With Blake, it was a certainty that it would be every day. Looking for distraction, she calls Roman, but forgets the time difference in Myanmar and he’s working and can’t talk. Her condo is quiet and feels massive now without Blake’s exuberant nature filling it. It’s really much to big for one person. She could find a much smaller place in California and fill it with the sounds of Roman and Shindy and a grandbaby.

With a heavy heart, she digs out her computer and fires it up and begins to price places on the opposite coast.

=MS=

She almost pulls off a transcontinental move without falling apart until Roman casually asks if she has anyone special in her life. She must bite her lip to stop herself from crying. She misses Blake terribly, but worries about how her son will react. He leaves it alone that day but asks again a few weeks later and it spills out because they’d been out to eat and despite herself, she’d worn that ring.

She tries to keep the description vague, but in the end, she’s pulling out her phone and scrolling to a picture she’d saved from the staircase on the ship only a few short months before. She can tell Roman’s taken by surprise, but he says nothing about how obviously much younger Blake appears than her.

“Did you love him?”

“I did.” She admits before amending it. “I do.”

“Then why’d you leave him?”

She opens her mouth to explain it, but nothing comes out. She’s not sure why they had to end things like they did except they’d both known it was never forever and it simply felt like an end. “I don’t know.”

“You should call him, Mom.” He tells her before he gets up to tend to something. While he’s gone, she stares at her ring and remembers laying in Blake’s arms under that endless night sky.

=MS=

She makes excuses until she’s holding her grandson in her arms. She hands Roman her phone and asks him to take some pictures she can share to her friends back in DC. Dylan is perfect and beautiful and she can’t pull her eyes away until it’s time to hand him back to Shindy, by then it’s late on their coast, even later back home and then it hits her that she still considers DC home.

She sends four messages with the photo and gets three simple congratulations in reply. The fourth, from Elizabeth, is much longer and pointed and questioning because it turns out that despite being two in the morning on the East Coast, they are pulling an all-nighter and so she knows Nadine’s sent them all a photo except Blake. It takes two minutes of silence, just long enough for Elizabeth to make an excuse and move from the conference room to her office and solitude, before her phone rings.

“He misses you.” She uses as a greeting. “He laid claim to that mug you left in the breakroom. Some poor new girl tried to use it last month and Jay had to physically haul him away when he started ranting about touching things that didn’t belong to her. Now all the junior staff walk wide circles around him.”

She wants to laugh and cry at that. Instead she focuses on something menial. “It has flowers all over it.”

Elizabeth chuckles. “When have you ever known Blake to care about what other people think when he loves something.”

That one hits her in the chest. “Well, yes.”

She seems to realize what she’s said and shifts the subject. “Dylan is perfect, tell Roman and Shindy for me.”

“I will.”

“And text Blake a picture. Tell him you got stopped to help with the baby and that’s why his didn’t come sooner, anything to make him not feel like you intentionally left him out. And Nadine?”

“Yes?”

“Then call him. If you are avoiding him, that means you miss him too. He still has too many vacation days piled up, maybe you can talk him into using a few.”

“Maybe.” The call ends and she does text a picture and an excuse, but she doesn’t call. It’s like being cut open again and she’s not sure she wants to go through the pain.

=MS=

Somewhere along the line, as her routine became filled with mundane retired activities that mostly revolve around keeping busy and helping look after Dylan, Nadine begins to dress simply, forgoing all the jewelry she loved to decorate herself with for decades save for the ring he’d given her on the cruise. It’s still on her right hand but in her heart, it weighs like a wedding band. It was given freely and out of nothing more than love, whereas any other jewelry a man had ever given her had eventually ben laced with other intentions.

Dylan’s crawling before she knows it and her phone rings, Elizabeth on the other end. “He’s started dating again.” Nadine can’t help a small amount of amusement at the greeting that she’s come to know as normal since she’s left. Every single day in the office, Elizabeth demanded a proper ‘good morning’, but on the phone and in casual conversation, the Secretary of State is simply too busy to waste such time. “He doesn’t carry himself the same as when he started dating you, doesn’t light up the same when he talks about him.”

“Him?” Blake’s orientation isn’t a surprise to her, not after all they shared.

“I’m not sure he’ll ever date another woman, honestly. I think his heart only has room for one.”

She should be used to Elizabeth’s way of making a comment that leaves her aching after. “I see.”

“You still avoid him. You’re hurting him. You two were friends before you started sleeping together, at the least you should try to be friends after.”

“This was all an accident.” It’s the first time she’s admitting it to anyone. “I didn’t mean to retire, though I’m glad I did. If I’d realized, I would’ve stayed so I didn’t lose him.”

Elizabeth snorts. “You both willingly hurt yourselves for the other. He’s dating because it gets the others off his back, he’s not happy, but he’ll see it through because that’s what’s expected. If you’re not careful, he’ll be married next and then where will you both be?”

“Moving on.”

“Hardly.”

“I’m on the West Coast now.”

“I’m not saying you move back. Yet. Start with a phone call.”

“I’ll think about it.” And she does, for a time. And then days turn into weeks and before she knows it, they’re watching Dylan play in birthday cake and she hasn’t heard from the other side of the country since fall.

The next phone call is Elizabeth again and it’s filled with so much to unpack. “I am resigning as Secretary of State, it will be officially announced tomorrow morning. On Monday I am announcing my candidacy for President. Mike B is my campaign manager, but his Ex decided to move to Portugal yesterday and leave him Theo, possibly to spite his career and now I need someone on the road running things. Honestly, I’m not sure I would’ve survived almost a year in a campaign bus with Mike B. I need you, Nadine. I know it’s last minute, but the hard work’s already done, I just need someone to keep the day to day from going to hell and as wonderful as Jay is as my Chief of Staff, I won’t pull him on the road and away from Chloe.”

She must sit down for all of that. “You want me to run your campaign?”

“Well, Mike and Jay will be doing a lot of the running, you would be more like schedule management and on-site support.” She can hear amusement in Elizabeth’s voice. “Daisy is going to be on the bus too, Matt’s doing my speeches from DC.”

There’s a gaping omission. “And Blake?”

The pause is massive and telling. She knows Blake went into policy, finally making use of that degree of his, but Elizabeth won’t have much use for a policy guy now, but Nadine honestly can’t see him allowing his boss to campaign without his supervision. “He’s demanded to return to being my personal assistant.”

“Does he know you’re calling me?”

The line is quiet again. “No.”

“It’s been nearly two years.”

“I know. But I need you both. And he’s unhappy here, so there’s no way I can convince him to let me travel alone.”

“What happened to his boyfriend?”

“He’s at risk of becoming a fiancée. He’s practically insisting on it. The boyfriend, not Blake. I don’t think he knows what Blake looks like happy… But I do.”

Nadine looks around her small condo. There’s nothing keeping her in California. She fills her time with Roman and his family, but they both work, and the baby is in daycare most days. “I’ll do it.”

“Can you be in Virginia before Monday?”


End file.
